Under Early Quebec Snow, a Jewel for Skiers

Christinne Muschi for The New York Times

QUEBEC IN WINTER Le Relais Ski Center is only about 15 minutes from the enchantments of Quebec City.

By BILL PENNINGTON

It also guaranteed a smile.

And where, just two weeks ago, was this winter wonderland?

Colorado? Utah? Idaho?

No, it was much farther east: a 30-minute drive from Quebec City, overlooking the St. Lawrence River at Mont Ste.-Anne. With a far colder climate than that of the northeastern United States, the mountains of Quebec’s suburbs are the hidden jewels of the early ski season. Largely ignored by American skiers and snowboarders, these areas are uncrowded this time of year, have fast lifts and offer varied terrain.

Best of all, they come with an added bonus: You can stay in one of the great cities of North America. With Quebec as a home base, a visit becomes more than just another ski trip.

There is the vast choice of Old World hotels and small charming inns. There are museums and concerts. Most important, without question, you will eat well. Choosing from the fine restaurants along the narrow streets of the 400-year-old city will never compare with picking a restaurant on the Killington access road.

Yet, at Mont Ste.-Anne, the biggest of the resorts within a half-hour of Quebec, only 10 percent of the annual visitors come from the United States.

Why? Don’t blame the newly unfavorable exchange rate, because there weren’t that many more Americans coming here two years ago. It comes down to basic American skier snobbery. We’re not just prejudiced against Eastern Canadian ski areas, we disregard dozens of the best ski areas in our midst, too.

Instead, we trundle off to the big players in the ski industry every season, influenced by mass marketing, our own egos and the wayward belief that a resort can’t be worth visiting if our friends back home have never heard of it.

So every Thanksgiving weekend, the hard-core among us in the Northeast are jammed onto the six or eight sketchy trails usually open at the well-known mountains in the region.

The far better choice would have been one of the 20 trails Mont Ste.-Anne had open Thanksgiving weekend (and there are now about 60). The area, with a vertical drop of 2,050 feet, had a snow base of well over 30 inches, had been open since Nov. 17 and probably could have opened the weekend before that.

You could have stayed at a slopeside condo if you wished, or made the easy, one-highway drive to Quebec, where inside the stone walls of the old city there was snow underfoot and a joie de vivre that needed no translation.

O.K., it’s colder and has more snow, but what about the fact that it’s also 140 miles north of the Vermont border? That’s a long way in winter.

Well, people in the East routinely fly to Salt Lake City or Burlington, Vt., to ski for long weekends. Quebec is a lot closer than Utah, and by air only slightly farther than Vermont; Continental flies direct from Newark, and Delta from Boston. The drive to Quebec from New York City is at least nine hours, but that can be broken up with a pleasant night at an inn along the way.

CLEARLY, it’s not a quick-and-easy trip, but aren’t most truly distinctive journeys worth a bit more effort?

“Outside of the Rocky Mountains, it’s the perfect place to start your season because we have snow from top to bottom, so your legs actually get in shape and you regain a normal rhythm,” said Jean-François Beaulieu, the Mont Ste.-Anne’s snow sports school manager, during my visit last month. “At most Eastern places this early, there might be snow at the top, but it’s hard to find a run without a section where you must stop, skate or slide past a thin section or a narrow stretch in the trail. Here, get off the gondola and go. You won’t stop for a several minutes.

“Unless you’re tired.”

And after negotiating some of Mont Ste.-Anne’s demanding glades, or even the blue-square tree runs of its Enchanted Forest section, you’ll probably be as out of breath as an overweight outfielder in spring training. There are three sides to the mountain, with the north side opening earliest since it is generally about six degrees colder than the trails that face south or west. Of the 66 trails that make up the resort, one-third are rated expert, including the inviting combination of La Belle et la Bête: the Beauty and the Beast.

The Beauty is a difficult, winding, 300-yard-long glade run that leads to the Beast, a double-black-diamond trail with a pitch of 33 degrees, one of the East’s steepest trails.

For those with vertigo (or more common sense), there are plenty of wide-open cruisers (one run is 3.6 miles long) and novice trails, too, especially as the winter season kicks into full gear at Christmas.

Mont Ste.-Anne has a children’s center with day care, a fleet of 250 instructors, whose motto is Fun Can Be Learned, and nearly 130 miles of cross-country trails through pristine fields.

But Mont Ste.-Anne does have an adventurer’s heart. Among the other on-site midseason activities: ice canyoning, in which you rappel down frozen waterfalls, and winter paragliding, which guarantees great views of the St. Lawrence River and the Laurentians.

Mont Ste.-Anne, though, is far from the only winter sports option in the region. Stoneham Mountain, 20 minutes north of Quebec City, is a popular destination of the park-and-pipe set and “new school” skiers — as it should be with a 22-foot-high and 850-foot-long halfpipe. Stoneham also has slope-style and border-cross courses and a lot of freestyle attitude.

But families from the nearby suburbs also flock to Stoneham’s 32 trails and 1,400 feet of vertical drop. And the après-ski scene there is renowned throughout the province of Quebec.

Le Relais, offering 25 trails, is the smallest of the areas near Quebec City but it is the closest to downtown, about a 15-minute drive north. Le Relais does a busy night-skiing business and also caters to families.

Farthest away, about an hour’s drive from Quebec, is Le Massif, which plans to open Saturday. With 45 trails and 2,526 feet of vertical drop, Le Massif is a lot of mountain with some challenging steeps, but its location makes a daily commute to Quebec City impractical, especially if it snows (and it does).

Le Massif is a worthy destination for a ski trip, as is Mont Tremblant, which is about 180 miles to the west past Montreal, but for an early-season, warm-up trip I prefer the areas close to Quebec.

I have, unquestionably, become biased, but time spent inside the walls of romantic old Quebec is intoxicating — and that’s even before you examine the wine-list possibilities. On the afternoon I arrived in Quebec with my wife and young son roughly two weeks ago, a soft snow was falling on the public ice skating rink in Place d’Youville opposite our hotel.

Three pairs of rental skates later, there was no doubt our Quebec vacation had begun. In the very heart of the city, in the shadow of 35-story office buildings and within steps of the regal St.-Jean gate guarding old Quebec, a dozen of us made carefree passes across the ice. There was no booming music or jostling crowds, just the sound of our skates gently carving the ice.

People young and old, few of them tourists, kept a placid, if practiced, pace. With no walls surrounding the ice surface and piles of snow perched at the edges, it was as if we were skating on a pond in 19th-century Canada.

Dinner that evening, and on other evenings, was no less characteristic of this distinctive North American city, which is celebrating its 400th anniversary this winter. The outlying areas of Quebec are drab and industrial, but the downtown and old city are unlike any other urban area on this side of the Atlantic.

The city is less cosmopolitan than Montreal and more French. With rows of 17th- and 18th-century houses forming an irregular, meandering maze of streets, it looks like France.

While attempts at speaking French are certainly appreciated by the locals, English is spoken cheerfully at restaurants, hotels and other destinations. But it is more fun to sit back amid the cacophony of a jammed bistro and listen to the mix of languages in a city that has had to be bilingual and multicultural for centuries.

AT Les Frères de la Côte, a restaurant on St.-Jean Street, locals and visitors occupied every wooden table as straw-hatted chefs worked in the open kitchen. The dinner special, as it is many nights, was fresh, tender mussels prepared and served in five different sauces or broths, each with a local flair (15 Canadian dollars, about $15.30 at $1.02 to the Canadian dollar).

The conversation, helped along by contributions from the varied wine list, went on into the night in all corners of the warm, noisy room, fueled, it seemed, by the nonstop delivery of tin buckets overflowing with mussels.

For us, there was time for a little window-shopping on the stroll back to our hotel, passing another half-dozen people quietly circling the skating rink. That walk, or perhaps a stomach sated by two buckets of mussels, brought a restful sleep.

As much as there was left to do in Quebec, it was a needed respite. There was another snowstorm expected the next day.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/travel/escapes/07quebec.html?ref=escapes

QUEBEC CITY - Donned in 17th and 18th century attire and colorfully corseted with an abundance of crinolines, three giddy ladies pass through the cobblestone streets nervously flickering their fans. An aroma of roasted pig and herbs fills the air, as a young lad recites Shakespearean verse amid the medieval music of flutes and harpsichords in the background. The clicking sounds of the horse-drawn carriage had just diverted my attention, as I tried to absorb the endless energy spiraling around me on the streets of the Old Quebec City.

I was a festivalgoer during the first week of August when Quebec City celebrates being French. The city normally attracts some 4 million visitors a year, with Americans being the largest number of foreign tourists. In 2008, there will be even greater fanfare when the city commemorates its 400th anniversary from the beginning of June to the end of September.

First founded in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain, Quebec City became the cradle of French civilization in America. Today, 98 percent of the population is French-speaking. The dialect spoken, though, is quite different from the French spoken in France.

The city, encased in 4.6 miles of 40-foot-high walls built by the British in the 18th century to protect itself from an American attack, makes Quebec the only fortressed city in North America. A pleasant pastime during a warm summer evening is a stroll along these historic ramparts.

Just beyond the walls is the Plains of Abraham, named after Abraham Martin, who brought the first colonists here. Once the national battlefield sprawling 235 acres, the Plains are now a picturesque park for dog walking, bike riding or just enjoying a leisurely walk.

Strolling through the narrow, winding stone streets of Old Quebec is like sleepwalking through a storybook. It's no wonder UNESCO declared the city a World Heritage Treasure. Another noted landmark, The Church of Notre Dame, built in 1688, is the oldest stone church in North America. There is no shortage of churches in Quebec City. Although some 80 churches have been constructed, many were de-sanctified, with altars removed, and re-created into concert halls, public libraries and even a circus school. I stepped into many a holy establishment during my week's stay.

The Fairmont's Le Chateau Frontenac is by far the most dramatic and well-known site, jutting out in all its grandeur in the middle of Old Town Square overlooking the St. Lawrence River.

This fabled chateau has been operating since 1893 and has been host to a lineage of celebrities and politicians. This long list includes Princess Grace of Monaco, Charles Lindbergh and Alfred Hitchcock. The hotel served as a meeting place during World War II for President Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill.

Centrally located amid the festival activities, Le Chateau Frontenac also serves a great breakfast buffet to prepare you for the day's events. At night, the surrounding area becomes even more magical. Street lamps circling the hotel illuminate the boardwalk overlooking the glistening skyline of the St. Lawrence. But for an even more dramatic sight during evening hours, don't miss the spectacular fireworks show coloring the waterfalls in a crimson glow from the Parc de la Chute Montmorency, as part of the International Firework Competition.

Though winter turns Quebec into a Christmas postcard, the summertime was a perfect time for me to experience the city's rich, historic past and joie de vivre. The sounds, tastes and aromas of the city are in full force. From French country cooking to novelle cuisine, quaint Quebec offers a plentiful array of first-rate restaurants amid a bevy of boutiques, bookstores, cafes and galleries. The best selection of eateries is along the Grande Allee to restaurant row. This expansive boulevard is riddled with places to dine outdoors and people-watch.

One of my favorite culinary experiences was at Gambrinus, just a short walk from Le Chateau Frontenac. The restaurant offers a reasonable and savory business lunch. Their outrageous chocolate cake topped off a most memorable meal.

The ambience was also quite pleasing. The windows were draped with hanging vines along the gray stone walls. Every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday evenings, musicians perform. Just below Gambrinus stands the Vieux-Port (Old Port). I was glad that I had good walking shoes to descend the hilly paths to and from the port area, where I was able to explore a district enriched with art galleries. All along the neighboring streets, I encountered brightly colored hanging flower baskets and window boxes adorning the storefronts of the stone buildings dating back to 18th and 19th centuries. A funicular, or steep stairway, is another way to descend to the water and browse the popular shopping area, the Quartier Petit-Champlain.

Returning back to the center of Old Town, I walked along the colorful Rue St. Louis and discovered Rue Dauphine and the Literary and Historical Society, once a prison, where on Saturdays at 1 p.m. children's stories are read. Though no children showed up the day I arrived, Monique, the storyteller, continued to read books to the only two adults present. I have to admit that I was totally engrossed in Monique's tales and velvety voice. I couldn't remember the last time I had a fairy tale read to me - and so apropos for this storybook city of Quebec.

IF YOU GO

For further information on Quebec City, go to www.quebecregion.com or contact the Office du Tourisme de Quebec at 418-641-6654.

Beverly Mann is a freelance travel writer.